


Getting It Right

by anr



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2002-01-10
Updated: 2002-01-10
Packaged: 2017-11-18 15:30:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,390
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/562593
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anr/pseuds/anr
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"They were indulgent days back then..." Janet reflects.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Getting It Right

**Author's Note:**

> SPOILERS: 2010 (4x16)  
> SOUNDTRACK: "Bitter" (Nine Days)

_If I could change anything, then I would wipe the years away_   
_If I could change anything, then I would change everything_   
_These bitter days shall remain_

  


* * *

  


Like a rat to the gutter.

That's how easy it was. Too easy, I think now. Because all it took was a sentence, half a dozen words, and the years just simply fell away. The anguish from past circumstances, the pain from broken promises, the heartache from wanting what I couldn't have... all disappeared with the touch of his hand on mine, and I find myself wondering now if it was always this easy? Was *I* always this easy? Or has my time spent in emotional purgatory over the years just made me more cynical about what I used to do so naturally and unassumingly?

He shifts in his sleep, body turning slightly as his limbs sprawl further across the mattress. Across the room, huddled in the chair near the window, I watch as he mumbles something incomprehensible under his breath before succumbing once more to the rigours of slumber. He sleeps peacefully for the most part, comfortably--a person with no demons to haunt him in the early hours of dawn. I wonder, how long has it been since I slept with that aura of innocence? Did I ever?

Huh. I sound like Jack, or at least, like how I've always thought Jack O'Neill would sound. Cynical, deprecating, and if the mood is right--self-pityingly. Maybe, if that is an accurate description, I should have ended up in his bed instead of the one I now watch. Two of a kind, perhaps. And if Jack and I are two of a kind, does that relate Daniel and Sam to the same category? I think for a moment about their lifestyles, and slowly concede that that thought has a sense of truth. Because if Jack and I have become the loners, the outcasts, of our previous friendships, then Daniel and Sam have surely become the successful ones, the well-adjusted and well-liked ones.

Great, now I'm begrudging my best friends their happiness. It's nice to know that as the years pass I'm becoming such a lovely person.

A mild breeze slowly starts to drift in through the open window, gently caressing the open blinds until a rhythmic sound fills the air as the edges of the blinds repeatedly tap against the glass. My skin erupts in gooseflesh as the cooler air touches my naked body, but I don't move, preferring the slight discomfit. The last thing I need is to get comfortable here--I may have been foolish enough to come, but I still have enough sense left in me to know that I can never stay, nor let myself want too. The world is large, and mean, and flights of fancy--I've since discovered--have no place here. Maybe they never did.

Of course, I didn't always think that the case. There was a time, many years ago, when I was as much a romantic as the next person. Back then, I used to dream and fantasise, wish and hope, and believe that miracles could and occasionally *did* happen.

I wonder, if this plan of ours works, will things still end up like this? I don't mean the 'big picture'--the extinction of the human race, the sterilisation of homo sapiens--but rather the little things. Will the SGC still go public? Will Kinsey still be elected President? Will Sam still marry a man named Joe? And will Daniel and I still slip into a life of random one-night-stands, peppered with the residual under-currents of bad choices and hastily made and broken promises?

Then again, thinking of the 'big picture', will we change the past only to spend the next--or past--ten years rebuilding the same future with only a few of the current players different? Because right now, in this timeline, in *this* present, the devil is the Aschen. But if we go back and give ourselves that second chance, will we still encounter somebody out there who will do the same thing? Maybe not through sterilisation but through some other, equally diabolical, version of genocide?

Are we giving ourselves the chance to make things right? Or to make the same things wrong again?

And with that thought in mind, do I have the right to make myself--or rather, my *younger* self--live through a version of what I have lived through? Because there's more than the emotional that's gone 'wrong' in my life, there's the other, more subtle, aspects that have been unpleasant. One of the foremost being the unwanted eviction from both of my careers. After all, what point is there in having soldiers if there are no more war's to fight or boundaries to defend; and what need is there for a doctor when the Aschen can cure--or at the very least, treat more effectively--any of the ailments that, in a manner of speaking, used to keep me in business?

When you are, for the most part, forced into an early and unwanted retirement at the age of thirty-seven, what do you do? Go home and simply be with your family? I, at first, thought that was a great idea and even saw the benefits. With the ability to live for just about forever, what better way to spend my current years than devoting them to my daughter. Until I realised that Cassie was at the age where she wanted to spread her own wings in this new and wonderful world we had created for her, and that her flight path was currently directed away from my nest.

So for awhile I became a woman of leisure, and when that bored me I decided to see if I could find myself a new career. But I couldn't. There just wasn't a career--or at least, a career that interested me--available. The Aschen, by that stage, were doing everything themselves. The few people--like Sam and Joe and Teal'c--who still worked with them, were there because they had been there from the beginning, or because they had a role that the Aschen still needed them to play, or because in one way or another, they had refused to leave. Because I had--momentarily at least--accepted my career evictions in the beginning, I'd all but ostracised myself from the *real* working communities, and it took me almost two years to fight my way back into medicine.

Even then--and now most certainly--there was and is no great need for my services. I see maybe one or two people a week, if that, in my 'surgery', and mostly they're older people; people who are still, even after all that the Aschen have done for us, cautious about these modern miracles. I've become, in many ways, a naturopath. I used to, not out of any real bias, dismiss the men and women who suggested 'dandelion petals' and 'mushroom powders' as medicines all those years ago, thinking that modern medicine, surely, was a better, safer, and more effective treatment. Funny how you're opinions change as the years go by.

He mutters something in his sleep again then, and I watch curiously as a frown momentarily appears on his features. Perhaps I was wrong to think that he has no demons? His face smooths again and I let my original thoughts remain.

Compared to the way my careers disintegrated, his all but flourished. Once the ridiculed and branded 'bad-boy' of his profession, the publicising of the Stargate validated Daniel in so many ways it was and still is, almost sickening. I don't really mean him any disrespect--after what he went through in the early years, surely this is his due--but by the same token, I can't help but feel, well, I suppose *jealous* is the correct word to use.

In the first few years of the Aschen occupation, when he was still with the SGC, he had the ability to enjoy the benefits of two towering achievements. His theories in his academic profession were proven completely correct, and thus he was vindicated of all previous 'wrong doings', whilst his role in the Aschen treaties gave him almost carte blanche with the rest of the world. When he finally moved away from the SGC it was to devote his time to the academic's that had previously shunned but now revered him.

His first book, all about his ancient civilisation theories--both proven and unproven--was on the New York Times bestseller list for fourteen months straight; and his second book, about his travels through the Stargate, beat that hands down. It's already been in the top ten for sixteen months now and shows no sign of disappearing any time soon.

Apparently there's even some movie director--Brad somebody, or is it somebody Brad?--who's decided to make some mega-movie about him. A sort of glamorous documentary blockbuster, starting with Daniel's grandfather and parents being archaeologists, through his years as an orphaned child, a penniless and ridiculed archaeologist, the saviour and 'creator' of the Stargate program, his tragic love affair and marriage to Sha're, and an overview of some of his most heroic moments and desperate tragedies when he was part of SG1. I saw a piece in a recent magazine that says they've already signed Tom Cruise to play Daniel, Harrison Ford as Nick, and Catherine Zeta Jones as Sha're. I think they're calling it 'The Daniel Jackson Movie'.

The dark smile on my lips fades briefly as I wonder if I'll have a place in that film, and if yes, then how will I be portrayed; how will *we* be portrayed?

The first night I ever spent with him seemed like one of those wonderful dreams; the ones where you're never quite sure if you're awake and living it, or asleep and merely conjuring the images from some part of your subconscious. It was a mistake, I see that now, but when it originally happened it had seemed like a fantasy come true.

They were indulgent days back then; those first few months of the Aschen occupation, when it seemed like we could all do no wrong. We were drunk on the success of our impending treaties, secure in our thoughts that we were saving the world in a way that no one else ever had and no one else ever could. Everything we did back then, whether it was connected to the Aschen treaties or not, was treated with the same brush of success. We were infallible, and we were always right.

Perhaps that was our downfall? We didn't see the sinister side to the Aschen because we *couldn't* see it. We were too arrogant to believe that any thing could be wrong with what we were doing. We were invincible, we were perfect--we had to be, because if we weren't then surely the Aschen would have seen that imperfection and run the proverbial mile.

And so a night was spent here, and a night was spent there--our bodies seeking, giving and receiving that wonderful feeling of ecstasy, the physical accompaniment to the euphoria that came from saving the world. I think we believed that, like our treaties with the Aschen, nothing wrong could ever or *would* ever happen to what we were doing. And if we drifted apart as the months went on, searching each other out less and less because of our growing sense of responsibility to the world we were saving, then surely that was to be expected.

He couldn't be the brilliant academic and black-sheep-turned-startling-white and still find the time to visit my bed... that wasn't a requirement. And even I, in those proceeding days and months, couldn't be expected to give up the opportunities to supposedly learn from the Aschen. Not if it meant having to choose physical gratification over the Aschen's. And if we had murmured promises of love, and of eternal devotion, in those nights of pleasure, then surely they weren't concrete, weren't ever meant to stand against the wonderful new world we were creating with the Aschen.

So the months became years, and as we drifted further and further apart, only to reunite for the occasional moment of shared pleasure, it didn't bother me. At least, that's what I told myself. Look at the bigger picture, see the grander scale, don't be so selfish. Wasn't meant to be, wasn't destined to happen, wasn't part of that *big* *picture*. One can always find a dozen reasons *not* to do something, I've realised over the years, a multitude to shadow the one *good* reason *to* do something.

My thoughts no more clear now then earlier tonight, I stand up and stare down the body of my lover in the bed. He rolls over in his sleep, arm splaying across the bed where I had previously lain, and I watch as his fingers twitch over the empty mattress for a moment. Slowly his eyes blink open, and I watch as he looks at me.

"Is something wrong?" he mumbles sleepily.

I shake my head, employing silence, and he sends me a quick smile.

"Then come back to bed."

With a small nod, I sink down onto the mattress beside him, allowing him to pull me into his embrace. And as he drifts off to sleep again, arms holding me close, a small tear creeps down my cheek.

Tomorrow we go to save the world once again. Only this time, we're going to save it from ourselves. From our arrogance and indulgence and biased beliefs of perfection. To change history and therefore, to change the present and the future.

Tomorrow, more than likely, we go to our deaths.

And I can think of a dozen reasons not to do it, and only one reason to do it.

Because it's *right*. It's the right thing to do.

As he holds me, I pray that our younger selves won't forge down the same roads we did, won't make the same mistakes we did. I pray and I hope and I fervently wish that Daniel and I will have another chance, a chance to love each other, and to do that without letting something, or somebody, else claim a greater importance.

We're going to put things right.

I hope.

  


* * *

The End

**Author's Note:**

> ORIGINAL URL: <http://anr.livejournal.com/420622.html>


End file.
